You’ll see him everywhere there’s anything doing. Yes, I suppose he’s a type. Dress clothes every evening; knows the ropes; calls every policeman and waiter in town by their first names. No; he never travels with the hydrogen derivatives. You generally see him alone or with another man.”

That snippet is from a short story by O. Henry (William Sydney Porter, 1862-1910), an AE speaker known for his clever stories.

It seems that the hydrogen derivatives are a group or class of people. My guess is that he means either females or those
without much social status. That’s pure speculation. I can’t find other uses of the phrase.
The story Man about town, was published in 1906.

Your guesses will likely be better than mine, or at least better informed.

]]>
WOTYtag:wordorigins.org,2016:index.php/forums/viewthread/.50812016-12-01T05:44:16ZDave Wilton
I’ve decided to throw in the towel, go with the flow, and come up with my own word of the year. But I’m going to do it a bit differently.

Instead of choosing a single word to represent the entire year, I’m going to come up with twelve, one for each month. One of the problems I’ve noticed with many WOTY choices is that they tend to represent events that happened at the end of the year, sadly neglecting what went on in the earlier months. I’m hoping that the twelve words will provide a better retrospective.

So I’m asking for suggestions. I’ve got a list of my own, which I’ll keep to myself for now, but it can always be improved with the input of others.

Criteria:
1) Must be a word or phrase that was in wide use during or associated with events of the month
2) Neologisms preferred, but by no means required. (Obviously I’m not looking for a word coined in that month, but a word of recent vintage is better.)

I’ll publish the list at the end of December.

]]>
Lügenpressetag:wordorigins.org,2016:index.php/forums/viewthread/.50802016-12-01T02:09:03Z2016-12-01T02:21:52ZOP Tipping
In 2014, Lügenpresse (lying press), was chosen as Sprachkritischen Aktion’s Unwort des Jahres (non-word of the year). Although largely associated with the Nazis, the term was also used in World War I. It became Unwort des Jahres by virtue of the fact that it became a popular term among the German anti-immigrant movement, particularly in slogans used at rallies.

As a testament to the English language’s willingness to accept outsiders, and also to America’s multiculturalism, the term has already been taken up among some American English speakers who are using it as a hashtag or yelling it at journalists. Sometimes it is also transliterated as lugenpress, lugen press, luegenpress, with or without the umlaut.

A few examples from the wild:

Conservative intellectual Richard Spencer uses the term at the annual conference of the National Policy Institute, 19 November 2016
“The mainstream media, or perhaps we should refer to them in the original German, *Lügenpresse*, it is not just that they are leftists and cucks, it is not just that many are genuinely stupid...”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1o6-bi3jlxk

]]>
Sufferagetag:wordorigins.org,2016:index.php/forums/viewthread/.50912016-12-08T07:33:58ZOecolampadius
On the first page of the New York Times, above the fold, is a poignant photo of graffiti on the wall outside the building housing the artists’ colony called the “Ghost Ship” that burned trapping about 33 people to their deaths.

One sign said, “Lord, please end the sufferage” whch led me to think of the line from Princess Bride where Mandy Patinkin, playing the marvelous character Inigo Montoya “You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means”

Putting aside for a moment the pain of that shocking event, it led me to wonder if “sufferage” (with three syllables) was ever used to mean “suffering.” I went to OED but the entry was written in 1915 and hasn’t been updated. There it is defined as “Permission, approval” with this marvelous quote from 1650:

1650 N. Ward Discolliminium 28, I will grant him as he saith, if he will hold to his spelling, that all is now united in the Sufferage of the People, though not in their Suffrage.

that suggests that there was a difference in spelling even in the mid-17th century.

Suffrage (two syllables) agaiin in a non-updated 1915 OED entry notes that there is only one meaning of that word, to vote or elect. AHD also does not list any alternative to voting, agreeing with, supporting etc with the following etymology

[Middle English, intercessory prayer, from Old French, from Medieval Latin suffrāgium, from Latin, the right to vote, from suffrāgārī, to express support; see bhreg- in the Appendix of Indo-European roots.]

Suffer has a second meaning of “too allow” (as in “Suffer the little children to come unto me") but has a different etymology in OED

]]>
Anthology of “Good” Writingtag:wordorigins.org,2016:index.php/forums/viewthread/.50902016-12-07T11:24:09ZDave Wilton
I’m looking for a collection of examples of “good” writing for use in first-year, university composition classes. Ideally the anthology will have examples from a variety of disciplines (humanities, sciences, engineering, journalism, etc.), as the students in the course will have diverse majors and fields of study. Fiction and creative writing examples are not required. It should also be reasonably priced. I’ve posted this request to my Facebook account, but I thought the folks here might possibly have a suggestion or two.

This past year I used Bedford/St. Martin’s Ways of Reading, which is the default selection chosen by the composition staff here at Texas A&M. While it is a collection of superb essays, and I would gladly use it again in a different course, throwing Michel Foucault or Judith Butler at first-year engineering students and expecting them to glean any lessons about writing from them is, to put it mildly, a tad optimistic.

]]>
BL: throw the book attag:wordorigins.org,2016:index.php/forums/viewthread/.50892016-12-06T06:33:15ZDave WiltonThe prosaic explanation is the more likely one, but the other explanation is more clever
]]>
retronyms vs. ?&nbsp;tag:wordorigins.org,2016:index.php/forums/viewthread/.50882016-12-04T17:46:12Z2016-12-04T17:49:04ZFaldage
A retronym is a name for something in the form ADJ N where the ADJ has been added to a N to distinguish and older version that now needs modification to distinguish it from a new version, e.g., acoustic guitar or analog clock. There is also a phenomenon where a term has an element that is no longer strictly speaking applicable, e.g., filming a news segment or making a mix tape. In the first case no film is involved. In fact it went from tape to some solid state medium but it is still often referred to as filming, Likewise a mix tape has gone from actual magnetic tape through CDs to present day files on something like an iPod. Is there a term for the latter phenomenon matching filming for the former?
]]>
metag:wordorigins.org,2016:index.php/forums/viewthread/.50772016-11-27T04:04:03Z2016-11-27T04:04:53ZFangshanPeter
When you start to learn Chinese, it is very surprising to find that ‘I’ is ‘me’, or ‘me’ is ‘I’. No distinction is made.

我wo3看kan4你ni3 I see you.
你ni3看kan4我wo3 You see me.

I asked myself: “Where do we get this ‘me’ from?”

I come to the conclusion, me is I， just as in Chinese.

I in Gaelic:

Irish: mé
Scottish Gaelic: mi
Manx: mee

etymonline.com

me
Old English me (dative), me, mec (accusative); oblique cases of I, from Proto-Germanic *meke (accusative), *mes (dative), source also of Old Frisian mi/mir, Old Saxon mi, Middle Dutch mi, Dutch mij, Old High German mih/mir, German mich/mir, Old Norse mik/mer, Gothic mik/mis; from PIE root *me-, oblique form of the personal pronoun of the first person singular (nominative *eg; see I); source also of Sanskrit, Avestan mam, Greek eme, Latin me, mihi, Old Irish me, Welsh mi “me,” Old Church Slavonic me, Hittite ammuk.

Erroneous or vulgar use for nominative (such as it is me) attested from c. 1500. Dative preserved in obsolete meseems, methinks and expressions such as sing me a song ("dative of interest"). Reflexively, “myself, for myself, to myself” from late Old English.

This says, ‘It is me.’ is wrong. Maybe it is just old? This says ‘me’ is the oblique form. Is that correct? Not in Gaelic I think.

Greek εἰμί I am (I don’t know Greek, but this looks a lot like ‘is me’)

Is ‘me’ just another form of ‘I’ borrowed to represent the accusative case, which it was not in ancient times? ‘me’ is ‘I‘？？

]]>
Official star namestag:wordorigins.org,2016:index.php/forums/viewthread/.50852016-12-03T18:27:00ZDr. TechieThis New York Times article reports that the International Astronomical Union has released a list of 227 officially recognized star names. These are all what a chemist would call “trivial” rather than “systematic” names (e.g., in chemistry, calomel rather than mercury (I) chloride, in astronomy, Antares rather than α Scorpii), but now they are officially recognized (and have official spellings).

They preserved a lot of historical, if sometimes obscure, names and I was pleased to see Rigil Kentaurus (more commonly known as Alpha Centauri A) on the list.

(I trust I need not mention to such a learned group as this that the so-called International Star Registry has no more authority to name stars than anyone else, and is essentially a scam. I seem to recall a skit from the early years of SNL when they mocked the ISR with a parody ad for an outfit that would sell you the right to name to name a hair on Ed Asner’s back, but I can’t Google up any confirmation of this).

]]>
See the elephanttag:wordorigins.org,2016:index.php/forums/viewthread/.50842016-12-03T09:53:39Z2016-12-03T09:54:08ZDr. Techie
Yesterday on CNN, I heard an interviewee discussing Pres.-elect Trump’s pick for Secretary of Defense use the classic phrase “he’s seen the elephant” to refer to Gen. Mattis’s” combat experience.
]]>